True Accounts
by Luxorien
Summary: Here lies one whose name was writ in water. Response to DZ Photo Challenge.


**True Accounts**

_Here lies one whose name was writ in water._

_- _Epitaph on the grave of John Keats 

**Bannerman Residence  
August 25, 2005**

He kneels at the top of the steps, the sheet of math problems in his hand forgotten. The carpet yields silently to his movement as he eases himself a little to the right, where the sound of his parents' conversation will carry more easily from the kitchen to the second floor.

"-more often. Walt, are you sure he's up to this?"

"He said he's fine."

"Johnny would say he's fine if his hair were on fire."

"What do you want me to do? Have him arrested for masochism?"

Though they've tried to keep the worst details from him, he knows what they're talking about. He always knows. He eavesdrops diligently, though not obsessively. He finds their world of hospitals and crime scenes and seriousness frightening in a voyeuristic sort of way. The fear, the sense of significance and danger, repels and attracts him.

There are sighs and sounds of movement from downstairs. He imagines his parents hugging each other, comforting each other the way they always do when they've finished talking. He rises silently from his crouch and returns to his room.

**Bancroft-Lewis Archives, New York  
Title: Smith Manuscript  
Author: John Bannerman-Smith  
Edition: Original Manuscript  
Date of Composition: 2072  
Copyright: 2082 Blackstone Publishing, New York  
Subject: Memoir - Psyology - Johnny Smith  
Location: Breaker Building, Level 3  
Comments: Security clearance required. Manuscript may not be removed from archives. See supervising librarian for details.**

I'm writing this down because I feel there should be a record somewhere of the things I know. I cannot take these secrets to the grave - they are too important to the survival of the living. There was a time when secrecy in these matters was crucial, but that time is nearly past. My final salvo in this struggle will be to bring it into the light of day, where others will be able to pick up where I leave off.

What needs to be known is this: the cause of death on Johnny Smith's death certificate is wrong. My father did not die of complications from a previous head injury. He was murdered for standing in the way of Armageddon.

You are probably rolling your eyes. Good. I wouldn't believe me either. I have instructed the law firm in charge of my will to have this document independently verified by both the Seriah twins and Rachel Cauthon, using the procedures I outlined in 2025 for _Neuroscience_. If the information I have collected over the years is accurate, they will see what I have seen.

To tell the story of my father's death, I must tell the story of my childhood and how I left it behind forever when I was nine. Sometimes it seems that I was never a little boy whose biggest concern was whether he'd get to play striker in the game on Saturday. Other times I wonder where that little boy went and how I missed his departure.

Although 2005 was a significant year for me, it was not the first time that scary things from the world outside had intruded on my innocence. My adoptive father, Walter Bannerman, was a sheriff for over thirty years. When I was very small, I used to have dreams about him not coming home, about the bad guys getting him while he was doing whatever mysterious things my five-year-old brain imagined sheriffs did. I grew up thinking that the world was a dangerous place, a first impression that over seven decades of experience have not contradicted.

Things came into clearer focus when my birth father woke up in 2001. At first he was just that weird guy who hung around my mom sometimes and occasionally worked with my dad. He was that friend of the family you don't really like but have to put up with because your parents do. I didn't spend any more time around him than was strictly necessary and I didn't know or particularly care why my parents did. I was mystified when Johnny Smith started turning up at family functions, but it didn't take long for uneasiness to be replaced with curiosity. He was, after all, constantly in the news. The other kids at school talked about him. I was intrigued by the difference between the way they saw him and the way I saw him. To me, he wasn't the celebrity that he was to everyone else. He was just this guy my parents knew. Not really remarkable at all once you got used to him.

The tension between my mother and adoptive father grew so gradually that they didn't notice it until it was practically palpable. I knew something was up but didn't connect it to Johnny until much later. I don't really know what it was like for the three of them and I'm not sure I want to ever find out. Knowing that it was a complicated emotional situation is enough. At the time, I didn't really care what was going on either. I just wanted it to stop so that things could go back to the way they were. But of course they didn't.

Finding out that Johnny Smith was my "real" father explained a lot but it didn't make me feel any better. I look back on that time of my life with a kind of nostalgia. Compared to what came after, that particular bombshell was practically innocuous. Through the patient efforts of my parents (all my parents) I gradually became accustomed to the idea of being the son of both Johnny Smith and Walt Bannerman. When that happened, I saw my birth father in a way I hadn't been able to see him before. Strange how much he seemed to change once I knew who he really was. He hadn't really changed at all, of course, but I was paying more attention. He was no longer a distant stranger but part of my family, someone I was supposed to know. Familiarity revealed him to be affable, intelligent and terribly anxious for my approval. And sometimes, when he didn't know anyone was watching, he looked very sad and very tired.

But even those impressions I got at picnics and fishing trips and parties were only glimpses. The coma that stole six years of Johnny's life also eliminated any chance that we could have a normal father-son relationship. Yet, by the time of his death four years later, I knew him better than anyone alive. It is a small mercy that the strangeness of both our lives allowed us to have something we never could have dreamed of having otherwise. Destiny took us away from each other, but it also gave us back, after a fashion.

**Bannerman Residence  
August 27, 2005**

He comes downstairs when he hears voices, even though it's past his bedtime. His dad sounds like he's on the phone in the kitchen. Johnny is standing in the foyer, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, but when he hears footsteps on the stairs he turns to look, a strained smile on his face.

He wonders sometimes if grown-ups realize how unconvincing they are when they try to hide things from him or from each other. He thinks that maybe there's some rule that if you ignore other people's lies they'll ignore yours. But if everybody knows that everybody else is lying, what's the point?

"Hi, J.J."

"Hi, Johnny." He's grateful that Johnny doesn't tell him to go back to bed. Johnny never treats him like a kid. "What's going on?"

"Your dad and I-"

What a weird phrase, he thinks. But it would sound even weirder if he'd said "your other dad." Sometimes the day his parents told him about Johnny seems like it never happened. Sometimes it's like a secret that everybody knows. It changes everything without really changing anything.

"-were just calling it a night." Johnny punctuates his explanation with a jaw-cracking yawn.

"Did you find that guy?" He regrets his question as soon as he asks it. Johnny slumps visibly.

"No."

"Hey, shouldn't you be in bed?" Dad asks as he walks in from the kitchen and ruffles his hair. He takes the hint and starts up the stairs. He glances over his shoulder to catch the sympathetic look Johnny shoots him. When he reaches the second floor, he shuts the door to his room from the outside and creeps back to the edge of the balcony.

"-let us know if anything turns up. In the meantime, you need to get some sleep."

"Yeah, yeah..."

"Come on, I'll drive you home."

**Smith Manuscript**

The last case Johnny Smith worked was the kidnapping of Ethan Hennock. Ethan's father, Brian Hennock, had just died and some former business associates were convinced that Ethan now possessed certain assets to which they felt entitled. Ethan, entirely ignorant of his father's financial dealings, wasn't much help to his captors.

But none of this information came out until later. All the police knew to begin with was that Ethan Hennock was missing. The investigation reached a dead end almost before it began, so Dad called Johnny. Over the course of the next week, they combed Ethan's home for clues. That was when the headaches started.

Johnny frequently had headaches after the coma. It's in his medical files. His doctors never really figured out why. To be fair, Johnny didn't give them much of a chance. He avoided the hospital whenever he could and frequently missed checkups. That's also in his files. A hagiographic explanation for this has surfaced in the years since his death. For admirers of Johnny Smith, this information is proof of his stoicism and disregard for his own safety. I don't deny that might have been part of it, but I think it had more to do with fear than courage.

The last four years of Johnny's life were defined by his accident – and not just because of the visions. The idea of a second coma terrified him more than death. He had signed all the paperwork necessary to ensure that he would not be kept alive in the event of further brain damage. He avoided doctors and painkillers and everything else that reminded him of how hard he'd been forced to work in order to regain just a fraction of what he lost. He didn't want to contemplate the possibility of a relapse. Is that bravery? I don't know. He was a good man, but he was also human.

The headaches he got during the Hennock case were different than anything he had experienced before. His doctors started calling them "whiteouts" because they were accompanied by a vision-like sensation of frozen time, but there were no images, just a uniformly searing light.

He managed to solve the case despite the headaches. The story's in all the Maine papers from that year. It even made it to the national news for a few days. He was admitted to the hospital shortly afterwards. The whiteouts came closer and closer together until one last headache that didn't end. He stopped responding to any external stimuli and started having seizures. There was talk of putting him on a respirator because his breathing had become so erratic the doctors were afraid he wasn't getting enough oxygen.

As far as they could tell, the area of his brain that handled visions was completely overloaded with stimuli. It was so active that they had to recalibrate the MRI so that they could see the signals from other areas of his brain. And the news from those quarters was not good: brain activity had nearly ceased.

So they cut him open. My mother authorized the surgery. They went in with the intention of neutralizing the overactive portion of his brain. The surgery was unsuccessful; there was no change in his brain activity. He died before they could pull the plug. For everyone else, his death was sudden but somehow mundane, a result of previous injuries. "Complications" the doctors called it. But nothing about his death was simple. Nothing about it was mundane. I know because I was there.

**Cleaves Mills Medical  
September 13, 2005**

He stands alone in the hospital room. He can hear his parents talking vaguely in the hallway, but for once their words seem incidental and unimportant. The emptiness of the room seems sharper and more real than whatever the adults are discussing. He is beginning to realize that he can be a participant in these events and not just an observer.

He approaches the bed, marveling at the way it dominates the emptiness without filling it. He can hear the faint, irregular pattern of Johnny's breathing through the oxygen mask. He looks at his father – he's still getting used to _that_ concept – lying there, insensate yet roiling with energy.

He's not supposed to be here. The adults think it would be too hard on him to see his father like this. A few days ago, Johnny was sitting up and smiling – tired, but making jokes. Now they're talking about "extraordinary measures." Whatever those are.

He knows that Johnny can't talk to him, can't tell him that everything's okay, that he'll be fine. He knows that he'll probably never talk to Johnny again. But he can't help but feel that just _being_ here is important somehow. If he were the one in the bed, he'd want someone there, someone to...just be there. He rests his hand on Johnny's arm, above the leather restraint around his wrist.

The contact triggers an eruption in his head. He snatches his hand back and staggers a few steps away, blinking furiously. It doesn't help. The blinding brilliance is deep in his head and has nothing to do with his eyes. But it _feels_ like he just looked straight into the sun. Times ten.

Johnny's wrists snap upward, straining against the leather straps as he convulses, back arched, breathing labored. Instinctively, J.J. reaches for his arm again.

_He's standing at the edge of Stewart Lake. There's a fishing pole in his hand. He's laughing as he tries to reel in a particularly recalcitrant fish, hoping it's as large as it feels. Johnny is next to him, laughing too. He remembers this. It's already happened. The fish was a twenty-inch bass. He took it home and begged his mom to cook it._

_--What's going on?_

_--I wanted the first thing you saw to be something...nice._

_Johnny is looking at him seriously now. The fish is forgotten. The sky turns darker and a rain-scented breeze kicks up. He can hear the water gurgling against the shore._

_--I'm having a vision right now._

_--Yes._

_--How?_

_--Because you're my son. Because you're touching me at just the right moment. Because...that's the way things are._

_--Are you going to get better?_

_--No._

_--You're going to...you're going to die, aren't you?_

_Johnny looks away, out over the lake as if searching for something he's lost. When he turns back, his eyes are sad._

_--Yes. And I need you to help me._

**Smith Manuscript**

I'm not sure how or why I inherited my father's gift. I never suffered a head injury. I haven't encountered any health problems as a result of my visions – not directly, anyway. When I visited him in the hospital, when I touched him, I started something that would define the rest of my life, but I still don't know how. All I know is that I had my first vision that day, a vision I shared with my father.

Some of what I learned then I didn't fully understand until years later. Much of it was tucked away in some dark corner of my mind until I had use for it or until I had gathered enough clues from elsewhere to make sense of it. This is one reason why I have waited so long to tell this story, but there are others. That night, I accepted responsibility for finishing what my father started and much of what I've had to do required stealth. But by now, anyone who reads the newspapers will know my enemy.

Here I make my confession: the Alderson murder was not my first vision about Janus. Before my father died, he passed on to me (among other things) a torrent of information on Janus. It was, in fact, Janus who killed him.

The headaches my father had been having were not aberrations. They were warnings. I have often said that large events cast long shadows – the more significant an event is (whether in terms of the number of people affected or its personal connection to the viewer) the more vivid its corresponding vision will be. What was in Johnny Smith's future was so overwhelming that he couldn't even get a clear picture of it. The headaches were visions of visions, and the closer he got to the event the more pronounced they were. He couldn't even see it until it was too late.

Janus made my father an offer and when it was refused, he arranged for a murder. He already knew how to avoid situations that might expose his dealings to my father's sight. There are ways to avoid appearing in visions and Janus made use of all of them – except when he wanted to be seen, of course. But in order to have my father killed, he had to go even farther than that. He had to figure out a way to sneak up on a psychic. His solution was to blind him.

There's a reason that visions have triggers. The mind simply can't handle visions nonstop. Not only will it drive you insane, it will eventually cause complete brain damage. This is what happened to my father. The murder weapon was a microchip, similar to the models doctors use for treating certain kinds of epilepsy. It stimulated the area of Johnny's brain that was rerouted after the accident, the part that perceived visions. He no longer required a trigger. He was having thousands of visions simultaneously. That was the inconceivably bright light he had been seeing: a thousand stories being told at once.

How Janus knew that his preparations for the implantation of the chip would cause Johnny's whiteouts and create the opportunity, during surgery, to put it in – that's still a mystery to me. I'm not sure what to think about an event causing itself. Still, as clever as he was, Janus missed something. He didn't count on Johnny being able to hold on to himself long enough to contact me. He couldn't have known that his tiny chip would give my father more power than he had ever had, enough to unearth a few of the secrets Janus was so careful to conceal. Though it cost him his life, Johnny was able to see farther than he ever had before, and what he found he passed on to me.

I've been holding onto this information for a long time. Parts of it I will hold onto forever. But one thing needs to be made clear: Janus' true goals have nothing to do with banal human ambitions like wealth or power. Janus and the organization he represents are after death and nothing more. They want to exterminate life on this planet. It is vitally important that this fact, extraordinary as it may seem, be recognized and acknowledged. As evidence I can only offer the vision that started it all, the one my father revealed to only two people before his death. It was the vision that drove him, the vision he spent years trying to prevent: Washington, the United States, the entire globe consumed in fire. If anything I've said is true, others will see this future, and maybe they will be able to succeed where my father and I have failed.

I like to think that this event, this Armageddon that Johnny died fighting, is not set in stone. I have always believed that the future is malleable and that we are in control of our own fates. But as I near the end of my life, with little to show for it but a stalemate, a postponement of the worst possible future, I wonder if there are some things that are meant to happen, some things that _must_ happen and cannot be changed. I cannot escape the impression that I have been trying all my life to wish away some immutable natural law, something as implacable as gravity.

But I also cannot escape the impression that something – maybe some natural law – was pushing my father and me forward, toward a new future that we could make. Johnny Smith's entire life was bound up with this single vision. He believed that something (maybe something as simple as Newton's Third Law) dragged him out of his coma long enough to lay the foundation for this fight.

The last time I saw him, in a vision somewhere between his mind and mine, we were standing next to a lake. The water had gone, replaced by a fluid, silvery light that slowly rose up and swallowed the shore. My father looked at it for a moment and then turned to me and said, "There's still time, J.J."

**Cleaves Mills Medical  
September 13, 2005**

_The light consumes the vision and he feels his father slipping through him, touching him with his fear and his sadness and his love. He stands with his father so he's not alone when death comes._

Johnny's arm is limp when he lets go of it. The room is silent except for a low alarm beeping sluggishly somewhere on the wall behind the bed. He backs away until he hits a wall. When the crash team comes in they don't notice him huddling on the floor. He stares at them as if he's never seen another human being before. They fade in and out of his awareness.

"...flatline. No brain activity either..."

"...he's DNR..."

"...okay, time of death: six twenty-two..."

He slips out of the room when no one's looking and walks down the hall to a window at the end of the corridor. He was with his father, they were talking, and now his father's dead. Now he's living in a place without Johnny. He had two dads, now he has one. Strange, that he doesn't really feel anything. His cheeks are wet, but he's doesn't feel anything. At least, he doesn't think he does.

He hears his mother calling his name. She's rushing down the hall. She didn't know where he was and now she wants to protect him. But she can't protect him because he already knows. He was there. He saw. So he doesn't turn around. He just looks at the sunlight crawling over the windowsill as if he's never seen it before. Because he hasn't.


End file.
